Traditional broadcast mediums, such as television and radio, allow very limited interactivity between broadcasters and their audience. Requests from select audience members can be fulfilled in some limited circumstances, such as song requests on radio. However, soliciting and managing requests from an entire audience is difficult.
Solicitation of audience preferences via the Internet has lowered some of the barriers to interactivity between broadcasters and their audience by allowing a more efficient dialogue. Existing online platforms, such as Facebook®, Google+™, YouTube®, Pinterest®, Twitter®, and others, allow voting on broadcast content, such as “tweets”, wall posts, and so on.
Votes on existing online platforms are cast on content not directly generated by the audience. Votes are garnered in the form of binary signals such as “+1”, “like”, and thumbs up/down with the message chosen by the broadcaster and not the audience. Broadcasters such as Facebook also use a “polling” functionality allowing broadcasters to poll an audience with a set of predefined choices. The available choices for such “polling” are designed by the broadcaster.
Each vote in existing online platforms is treated equally. For instance, on platforms such as Facebook, fans can vote (e.g. using the “like” function) for a celebrity's broadcast. Every fan can vote once, and that vote is treated the same as votes cast by others.